Every year my neighbor and I plant a community garden. Well, it’s not so much community as just her and me, but community garden makes me feel like a flower child living on a commune. And it’s important to keep my imagination working when we’re planting the garden, because, well, it takes faith.

Because you never know what the seeds will do, or the weather will do, or what the rabbits (rabbits!) will do. So we plant and we pray on it – well, we meditate on it, because we are sixties flower children…

What does this have to do with social media or marketing?

As much as you think you can control the world, or predict what will happen, sometimes you just can’t. And this goes for marketing and social media, too.

I am working with a client now on a Facebook promotion. We are running a contest to promote an event. She has been worrying about it the way you worry over a garden. “What if I blow all this money on a gift card to REI and no one shows up? “

It’s the same as composting all year and getting blossom rot or worms or rabbits! eating your strawberries!

Fences

She emailed: “I don’t want to let people who haven’t registered for the event to be able to enter our contest.”

This is the same as trying to protect the strawberries from the rabbits. You fence them out, you rig up chicken wire, black pepper, human hair (ick). All you have is a mess. And the rabbits still get in.

Abundance

This year I am going to approach the garden from abundance rather than barricades. I’ll plant enough strawberries for rabbits and humans – and I’ll let you know what happens.

As far as Facebook contests, abundance always works better than fencing.

Here’s an example.

My friend’s 18-year-old son has 1,749 friends on Facebook. He can’t register for the event because he has a lacrosse game that weekend. He loves video, though, and needs some new gear from REI – so he enters the contest.

And he really wants to win

So every day during the voting period, he talks up my client’s Facebook page – driving all 1,749 of his friends (who have never heard of her non-profit) there. And his video is so whack (or whatever the kids are saying these days) that it gets talked about by friends of friends and so on… and more people hear about the event and end up registering for it…

More

So we could rig up the chicken wire and only let a select few into the contest – but I think we’ll get more strawberries if we just plant the whole field.